Having gotten a ton of messages today asking me what, exactly, a community registration portal is, here's the deal. Various non-Linden groups in Second Life have their own orientation facilities. Many of these are already using the third-party-registration interface to bring in customers/communities.

The signup page now features a choice of places. The first step looks like this (at least for some of you. Not everyone is seeing this):

Those sites listed are Azure Islands, Mainland Brasil (in Portuguese), The L Word, Big Pond, NMC Campus, and Anshe Chung's Dreamlands (in Chinese). These are intended to completely replace the orientation island/help island/welcome area experience that new users would otherwise experience.

This is cited as an experimental trial to to study orientation processes and to examine the effect on resident retention rates. Since retention metrics go out to 90 days, I don't expect we'll have the results quickly. With Linden Lab very tight-lipped about retention metrics, it's uncertain as to whether we'll find out the results at all.